Wednesday, May 07, 2014

So what do retired people do?Well I just completed researching and writing
an article on a man with three legs who used to live down the street from our
house.And immediately before sitting
down to type the following essay I was removing some invading dandelions from
the lawn on Mars and my property.

Second things
first.Digging out dandelions was a
favorite hobby of mine long before voluntarily leaving the workforce.This worthy adversary’s long, tenacious root
and promiscuous propagation practices can easily turn someone with even the
mildest case of obsessive compulsive gardening disorder into a rampaging Rambo
of eradication bent on the wholesale destruction of what is actually a not
totally unattractive plant.

For some
reason my preferred form of combat is hand-to-hand – or more accurately
forked-tongued weeding tool to infinitely long taproot.It is early spring here in Connecticut.We have just come off three days of pretty
much continuous rain registering 4 plus inches in our measurement gauge, and
creating a tidal pool effect on our landscape.But the good news is that the precipitation took a break – the sun
emerged for a bit – and the earth within which the yellow “flower” seeks
anchorage now held a loose, slippery attachment to its embedded invaders.

Garbed at my
pedal and digital extremities with muck boots and rubber gardening gloves I
slogged across my lawn seeking out and rooting up these early seasonal adaptors
– some in flower, some lying low, and one roughly the size of an Outback
restaurant Blooming Onion Ring.The walk
from plant to plant was more effort than the work to dig up my unwelcome
visitors – but the result was still difficult enough to be satisfying.And the sucking sound from the soil as it
willingly gave up its low-lying lodgers provided the perfect soundtrack.

I began
writing essays at about the same time that I began manually uprooting
dandelions.I always felt that the two
avocations were somehow related but I have never been able to fully understand
or articulate the connectionA few years
into my new literary hobby I took a writing course at a local university.We were assigned a short composition that
told something about ourselves, and our interest in writing.I no longer have a copy, but the thesis was the
coincident timing of these two activities – with no attempt to explain why or
how they were related.As I remember, my
write-up was considered quite profound.(I should mention that “show not tell” was the workshop’s modus operandi
– so in some sense ignorance of the reason something happened was perceived as
a somewhat of a virtue.)

For several
years I drafted mostly what I would call semi-humorous, semi-philosophical,
semi-gardening essays for my garden club newsletter and our local
newspaper.Then after retirement Mars
and I became involved in Wethersfield Historical Society and I began penning
non-academic history articles for the organization’s website – “tell not show”
storytelling where the narrative is driven by facts of the case rather than the
free form, stream of conscious ramblings of the author.Which is how I became involved with Francesco
Lentini – The Human Tripod.

It began with
a letter received by the society in which a former town resident recalled
“playing touch football in an empty field near the Brimfield Rd. home of the
Lentini family, when the three legged Frank Lentini kicked the football with
his third leg.”With the note was a
Xerox copy of an article on the life and career of the tripodal punter.

That
enclosure, plus a quick check of Wikipedia, told the basics of the story.Francesco Lentini was born May 18, 1881 in
Rosolino Italy with a third full-sized leg extending from the right side of his
body.At the age of eight he was moved
to the United States where he subsequently performed as “The Great Lentini” in
various circus and carnival “sideshows” including P.T. Barnum, Ringling
Brothers and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.He married Theresa S. Murray of Massachusetts, and they had four bipedal
children.And he died on September 22, 1966.

But, most importantly for our
purposes, from 1926 to 1938 Frank Lentini and his family resided on the same
street where Mars and I now live in Wethersfield.

I wasn’t
explicitly asked by either the society’s Director or Collections Manager – but
I left the office thinking that it was my task to create an historic account of
Wethersfield Connecticut’s most famous circus freak.I also had a slightly uneasy feeling about
delving into the world of performing mutants, even under the guise of
historical research.

Frank Lentini
was known as “The King” of circus sideshow freaks.And there is no shortage of information about
him on the Internet – most of it basically repeated verbatim across websites
created by zealous aficionados of that part of the entertainment world.And of course on the aforementioned
Wikipedia.

There are
public records of Lentini’s time in Wethersfield, but nothing about anything
noteworthy that he had done while living in town.I had read that “A historical person or
event can acquire significance if we, the historians, can link it to larger
trends and stories that reveal something important for us today.”So I decided to tell about his life in
relation to the story of the Italian immigration to America, and the history of
circus “freak shows”

I found one
newspaper article on Frank Lentini’s childhood journey from Italy to the States
that I used – but nothing that could be even loosely beconsidered academic sources.The closest thing to serious scholarship was
a page in "The People's Almanac – Footnote People in American
History" by David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace.

Wallace was an
American best-selling author and screenwriter – according to Wikipedia “known
for his heavily researched novels".David Wallechinsky is his son who reverted back to the original family
name.Their piece on Frank Lentini was
the only one that had any information disagreeing with the lockstep recitation
of facts elsewhere on the ‘net – most notably the location of his death.Was it Florida (the majority position) or
Tennessee (as Wallace & Wallechinsky alleged)?

Presented with
the possibility of actual, factual research I contacted the offices of Vital
Statistics in both states and discovered that Frank Lentini’s place of death
was indeed Jackson Tennessee.Evidently
Wallace’s investigative curiosity applied to non-fiction as well as novels.

I reported my
fact-finding results in the historical society article.Now I get to become a “Wikipedian” and
correct the posting on that website.No
one will probably notice or care. But that’s okay.Sometimes just getting to the root of
something is a reward in itself.